All of g's Comments + Replies

kebko, (1) doubtless there's something terribly dysfunctional going on; the question is whether it's better treated by giving more aid or by giving less. (2) If the continent's GDP might have been larger than it is, then the argument I was making applies more, not less. (Namely: the amount of foreign aid seems very small in comparison with the total size of the economy, which suggests that the amount of influence it can have had for good or ill probably isn't all that enormous.)

Carl, I like the idea of inventing things and making them free, but it might be... (read more)

Perhaps I should point out one particular way in which I could be badly wrong: presumably aid tends to go to the poorest African countries, whose GDP may be way below the average, so 1% of GDP might turn out to be a substantial amount for the countries it actually goes to. Perhaps Moyo's book has the relevant numbers?

Eliezer, it's clear that Africa is in trouble. How compelling an argument does Moyo's book offer for believing that Africa is in trouble because it needs less aid, rather than because it needs more?

In this particular context it seems a bit strange to describe Moyo as an African economist. She lives in London and so far as I can tell has lived in the West for most of her adult life. In particular, the two most obvious reasons one might have for trusting an African economist more on this issue -- that her self-interest is more closely aligned with what's bes... (read more)

I'm not sure whether "it" in Rasmus's second paragraph is referring specifically to the fact that you can submit old predictions, or to the idea of the site as a whole; but the possibility -- nay, the certainty -- of considerable selection bias makes this (to me) not at all like a database of all pundit predictions, but more another form of entertainment.

Don't misunderstand me; I think it's an excellent form of entertainment, and entertainment with an important serious side. But even if someone is represented by a dozen predictions on Wrong Tomor... (read more)

vroman, see the post on Less Wrong about least-convenient possible worlds. And the analogue in Doug's scenario of the existence of (Pascal's) God isn't the reality of the lottery he proposes -- he's just asking you to accept that for the sake of argument -- but your winning the lottery.

Carl, it clearly isn't based only on that since Eliezer says "You see it all the time in discussion of cryonics".

Eliezer, it seems to me that you may be being unfair to those who respond "Isn't that a form of Pascal's wager?". In an exchange of the form

Cryonics Advocate: "The payoff could be a thousand extra years of life or more!"

Cryonics Skeptic: "Isn't that a form of Pascal's wager?"

I observe that CA has made handwavy claims about the size of the payoff, hasn't said anything about how the utility of a long life depends on its length (there could well be diminishing returns), and hasn't offered anything at all like a probability calcul... (read more)

(Second attempt at posting this. My first attempt vanished into the void. Apologies if this ends up being a near-duplicate.)

Patrick (orthonormal), I'm pretty sure "Earth" is right. If you're in the Huygens system already, you wouldn't talk about "the Huygens starline". And the key point of what they're going to do is to keep the Superhappies from reaching Earth; cutting off the Earth/Huygens starline irrevocably is what really matters, and it's just too bad that they can't do it without destroying Huygens. (Well, maybe keeping the Superhappies from finding out any more about the human race is important too.)

Patrick (orthonormal), I'm fairly sure that "Earth" is correct. They haven't admitted that what they're going to do is blow up Huygens (though of course the President guesses), and the essential thing about what they're doing is that it stops the aliens getting to Earth (and therefore to the rest of humanity). And when talking to someone in the Huygens system, talk of "the Huygens starline" wouldn't make much sense; we know that there are at least two starlines with endpoints at Huygens.

Eliezer, did you really mean to have the "multiplication factor" go from 1.5 to 1.2 rather than to something bigger than 1.5?

Beerholm --> Beerbohm, surely? (On general principles; I am not familiar with the particular bit of verse Eliezer quoted.)

Wei Dai, singleton-to-competition is perfectly possible, if the singleton decides it would like company.

Reasoning by analogy is at the heart of what has been called "the outside view" as opposed to "the inside view" (in the context of, e.g., trying to work out how long some task is going to take). Eliezer is on record as being an advocate of the outside view. The key question, I think, is how deep are the similarities you're appealing to. Unfortunately, that's often controversial.

(So: I agree with Robin's first comment here.)

I'd suggest:

1. Existing contributors keep posting at whatever frequency they're happy with (which hopefully would be above zero, but that's up to them).

2. Also, slowly scour the web for material that wouldn't be out of place on OB. When you find some, ask the author two or three questions. (a) May we re-post this on OB? (b) Would you like to write an article for OB? (c) [if appropriate] May we re-post some of your other existing material on OB?

3. If the posting rate drops greatly from what it is now, have more open threads. (One a week, on a regular schedule?

Richard, I wasn't suggesting that there's anything wrong with your running a simulation, I just thought it was amusing in this particular context.

Anyone who evaluates the performance of an algorithm by testing it with random data (e.g., simulating these expert-combining algorithms with randomly-erring "experts") is ipso facto executing a randomized algorithm...

So, the randomized algorithm isn't really better than the unrandomized one because getting a bad result from the unrandomized one is only going to happen when your environment maliciously hands you a problem whose features match up just wrong with the non-random choices you make, so all you need to do is to make those choices in a way that's tremendously unlikely to match up just wrong with anything the environment hands you because it doesn't have the same sorts of pattern in it that the environment might inflict on you.

Except that the definition of "... (read more)

nazgulnarsil, just because you wouldn't have to call it a belief doesn't mean it wouldn't be one; I believe in the Atlantic Ocean even though I wouldn't usually say so in those words.

It was rather tiresome the way that Lanier answered so many things with (I paraphrase here) "ha ha, you guys are so hilariously, stupidly naive" without actually offering any justification. (Apparently because the idea that you should have justification for your beliefs, or that truth is what matters, is so terribly terribly out of date.) And his central argument, if... (read more)

Vladimir, if I understand both you and Eliezer correctly you're saying that Eliezer is saying not "intelligence is reality-steering ability" but "intelligence is reality-steering ability modulo available resources". That makes good sense, but that definition is only usable in so far as you have some separate way of estimating an agent's available resources, and comparing the utility of what might be very different sets of available resources. (Compare a nascent superintelligent AI, with no ability to influence the world directly other t... (read more)

How do you avoid conflating intelligence with power? (Or do you, in fact, think that the two are best regarded as different facets of the same thing?) I'd have more ability to steer reality into regions I like if I were cleverer -- but also if I were dramatically richer or better-connected.

PK, I thought Eliezer's post made at least one point pretty well: If you disagree with some position held by otherwise credible people, try to understand it from their perspective by presenting it as favourably as you can. His worked example of capitalism might be helpful to people who are otherwise inclined to think that unrestrained capitalism is obviously bad and that those who advocate it do so only because they want to advance their own interests at the expense of others less fortunate.

I agree that he's probably violating his own advice when he implies that capitalism amounts to treating "finance as ... an ultimate end".

To those who are saying things like "Eliezer, someone will get power anyway and they'll probably be worse than you, so why not grab power for yourself?", and assuming for the sake of argument that we're talking about some quantity of power that Eliezer is actually in a position to grab: If you grab power and it corrupts you, that's bad not only for everyone else but also for you and whatever your goals were before you got corrupted. Observing that other people would be corrupted just as badly defuses the first of those objections to power-grabbing, but not the second.

Bo, the point is that what's most difficult in these cases isn't the thing that the 10-year-old can do intuitively (namely, evaluating whether a belief is credible, in the absence of strong prejudices about it) but something quite different: noticing the warning signs of those strong prejudices and then getting rid of them or getting past them. 10-year-olds aren't specially good at that. Most 10-year-olds who believe silly things turn into 11-year-olds who believe the same silly things.

Eliezer talks about allocating "some uninterrupted hours", bu... (read more)

Unfortunately, the capabilities of an omnipotent being are themselves not very well defined. Suppose we want to determine whether "The Absolute is an uncle" is meaningful. Well, says the deranged Hegelian arguing the affirmative, of course it is: we just ask our omnipotent being to take a look and see whether the Absolute is an uncle or not.

Butbutbutbut, you say, we can't tell it how to do that, whereas we can tell it how to check whether there's a spaceship past the cosmological horizon. But can we really? I mean, it's not like we know how to ma... (read more)

Interesting aesthetic question raised by Caledonian's comment: "not beckoning, but drowning" versus "not wading, but drowning". I think the latter would have worked much better, but presumably C. thought it too obvious and wanted to preserve more of Stevie Smith's semantics. :-)

Arthur, what would keeping a time coordinate buy you in your scenario? Suppose, simplifying for convenience, we have A -> B -> C -> B [cycle], and suppose each state completely determines its successor. What advantage would there be to labelling our stat... (read more)

You can make positions relative in ways other than using pairwise distances as your coordinates. For instance, just take R^4n (or R^11n or whatever) and quotient by the appropriate group of isometries of R^4 or R^11 or whatever. That way you get a dimension linear in the number of particles. The space might be more complicated topologically, but if you take general relativity seriously then I think you have to be prepared to cope with that anyway.

So, in Eliezer's example of triangles in 2-space, we start off with R^6; letting E be the group of isometries o... (read more)

Yeah, but when playing actual Taboo "rational agents should WIN" (Yudkowsky, E.) and therefore favour "nine innings and three outs" over your definition (which would also cover some related-but-different games such as rounders, I think). I suspect something like "Babe Ruth" would in fact lead to a quicker win.

None of which is relevant to your actual point, which I think a very good one. I don't think the tool is all that nonstandard; e.g., it's closely related to the positivist/verificationist idea that a statement has meaning only if it can be paraphrased in terms of directly (ha!) observable stuff.

Lee, I'm confident that you'd find that "97 is approximately 100" seems more natural to most people than "100 is approximately 99". As for the percentage differences, (1) why should the percentage difference be the thing to focus on rather than the absolute difference, and (2) why do it that way around? (Only, I think, because of the effect I mentioned above: when you say "X is approximately Y" you're implicitly suggesting Y as a standard of comparison, because it's useful for that purpose one way or another.)

Tiiba, I don't think what I described is a bias, but perhaps I didn't explain it well. I'm proposing that in phrases like "X is approximately Y" and "X is like Y", the connectives are not intended to be taken as symmetrical relations like "differs little from"; rather, they mean something like "If you want to know about X, it may be useful to think about Y instead". And I don't see anything wrong with that, as such.

Let me give an analogy from a field where bias is quite effectively eliminated: pure mathematics. Mathe... (read more)

Has it been established that people who prefer "98 is approximately 100" to "100 is approximately 98" or "Mexico is like the US" to "the US is like Mexico" do so because, e.g., they think 98 is nearer to 100 than vice versa? It seems to me that "approximately 100" and "like the US" have an obvious advantage over "approximately 98" and "like Mexico": 100 is a nice-round-number, one that people are immediately familiar with the rough size of and that's easy to calculate with; the... (read more)

Jeffrey wrote: To me, this specific exercise reduces to a simpler question: Would it be better (more ethical) to torture individual A for 50 years, or inflict a dust speck on individual B? Gosh. The only justification I can see for that equivalence would be some general belief that badness is simply independent of numbers. Suppose the question were: Which is better, for one person to be tortured for 50 years or for everyone on earth to be tortured for 49 years? Would you really choose the latter? Would you not, in fact, jump at the chance to be the single ... (read more)

And we should be wary to select something orthodox for fear of provoking shock and outrage. Do you have any reason to believe that the people who say they prefer TORTURE to SPECKS are motivated by the desire to prove their rationalist credentials, or that they don't appreciate that their decisions have real consequences?

Josh, if you think about a picture like the one Eliezer drew (but in however many dimensions you like) it's kinda obvious that the leading term in the difference between two n-cubes consists of n (n-1)-cubes, one per dimension. So the leading term in the next difference is n(n-1) (n-2)-cubes, and so on. But that doesn't really give the n! thing at a glance. I'm not convinced that anything to do with nth differences can really be seen at a glance without some more symbolic reasoning intervening.

James Bach, I suspect that the really good mathematicians can't... (read more)

Eliezer's use of "the one" is not an error or a Matrix reference, it's a deliberate echo of an ancient rabbinical trope. (Right, Eliezer?)

denis bider, I thought Eliezer's use of "the one" was a deliberate echo of a rabbinical or Talmudic idiom, though I'm not sure how I got that idea and my google-fu isn't sufficient to verify or refute it. ... Ah, but take a look e.g. at page 8 of this book.

Incidentally, Al Cellier, what on earth is scientology doing in your list? It has (so far as I can see) nothing in common with the other items in the list, either in terms of shared beliefs or shared adherents. Are you just trying to annoy any singularitarians and transhumanists who are reading what you write?

Eliezer, I don't think your story would have been appreciably weakened if you'd just deleted the words "to talk about the Singularity". On the other hand, I also don't see any reason why you should have to avoid mentioning Your Strange Beliefs either. Also: surely the conjunction fallacy is not a bias, but a symptom of a bias. (The bias in question being more or less a special case of the availability heuristic: the more detail we're provided with, the easier it is to imagine whatever-it-is.)

burger flipper and Zubon, I think (1) Eliezer's thought... (read more)

K Larson, I think Eliezer was wrong about bad political jokes, for two reasons. Firstly, a joke depends on its context, and it may not be possible to depoliticize a joke without losing something essential in the context. Secondly, like it or not, most of us do find it funny to see a disliked powerful figure get their comeuppance, which means that when assessing how good a joke is it's an error to penalize it for getting some of its laughs that way.

(But he was right when he said that finding what would otherwise be a bad joke funny is evidence that its targ... (read more)

Joseph, I think the externals of the Christmas and Easter stories (virgin birth arranged by God; agony, death, resurrection, again arranged by God) are pretty much equally coherent. (Coherence isn't their problem.) But the point of each story, for Christians, is something much harder to swallow: Christmas is supposed to be about the Incarnation (with Jesus somehow being entirely human, just as much as we are, and entirely God, etc.) and Easter about the Atonement (where the whole death-and-resurrection thing somehow enables God to forgive the sins of human... (read more)

Jey, I think the dichotomy between religious and other beliefs (in how much offence disagreement causes) isn't so stark as it's sometimes painted. Random example: US politics; how would a staunch Reaganite Republican react to the suggestion that Reagan's policies were all deliberately designed simply to funnel money to his big-business pals? For that matter, how do biologists generally react when creationists accuse them (in effect) of a gigantic conspiracy to suppress the truth? I think there's at least some offence taken in both cases, and those accusati... (read more)

Only because you think of Japanese schoolgirls and tentacle monsters once a minute.

Adirian (sorry for not noticing your response sooner), the situation is more like: we have a million data points and several models that all fit those points very precisely and all agree very precisely on how to interpolate between those points -- but if we try to use them to extrapolate wildly, into regions where in fact we have no way of getting any real data points, they diverge. It also turns out that within the region where we can actually get data -- where the models agree -- they don't agree merely by coincidence, but turn out to be mathematically e... (read more)

rukidding, it's obvious that it's saved some lives (of people who would have been killed by Saddam Hussein and his minions) and cost some lives (of people killed by US forces, or by the people opposing them, or as a result of the general state of lawlessness and civil war in Iraq, or because the chaos there has produced poverty, poor healthcare, etc.), and certainly someone who is unable to consider both doesn't belong in the argument.

But if you're saying that no one "belongs in the argument" who can't make both a serious argument that on balance... (read more)

denis bider, the people who perpetrated the 2001-09-11 attacks died, and knew they were going to die, so others like them won't be deterred by the likelihood that the USA will go after them personally. It doesn't seem like the US's overreaction to those attacks has been all that effective in harming al Qaeda (I mean, bin Laden is still alive so far as anyone knows). It doesn't seem like it's been all that effective in making people who might have been sympathetic to groups like al Qaeda less so.

So I'm wondering how you expect the overreaction to deter other people who might be considering similar attacks.

Eliezer, I first saw the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" made the way you describe in something by Richard Carrier. It was probably a blog entry from 2007-01, which points back to a couple of his earlier writings. I had a quick look at the 2003 one, and it mentions a few antecedents.

Nick: Oh, sorry, I forgot that there are still people who take the Copenhagen interpretation seriously. Though actually I suspect that they might just decree that observation by a reversible conscious observer doesn't count. That would hardly be less plausible than the Copenhagen interpretation itself. :-)

(I also have some doubt as to whether sufficiently faithful reversibility is feasible. It's not enough for the system to be restored to its prior state as far as macroscopic observations go; the reversal needs to be able to undo decoherence, so to speak. ... (read more)

I think "completely and totally contradictory" is putting it too strongly, since they do in fact all agree about all observations we have ever been able to make or ever anticipate being able to make. Extreme verificationists would argue that the bits they disagree about are meaningless :-).

But some Great Thingies might not be readily splittable. For instance, consider the whole edifice of theoretical physics, which is a pretty good candidate for a genuinely great Thingy (though not of quite the same type as most of the Great Thingies under discussion here). Each bit makes most sense in the context of the whole structure, and you can only appreciate why a given piece of evidence is evidence for one bit if you have all the other bits available to do the calculations with.

Of course, all this could just indicate that the whole edifice of theoret... (read more)

rukidding, Eliezer has already said -- in this very comments thread -- that he isn't aiming to deconvert Christians but to use some features of Christianity as a case study.

The damages experiment, as described here, seems not to nail things down enough to say that what's going on is that damages are expressions of outrage on a scale with arbitrary modulus. Here's one alternative explanation that seems consistent with everything you've said: subjects vary considerably in their assessment of how effective a given level of damages is in deterring malfeasance, and that assessment influences (in the obvious way) their assessment of damages.

(I should add that I find the arbitrary-modulus explanation more plausible.)

Ouch, don't the units in that diagram hurt your brain? (Yeah, I understand what it means and it does make sense, but it looks soooo wrong. Especially in my part of the world where an ounce is a unit of mass or weight, not of volume.)